Abbas Laments: US Not Advancing Peace

Published yesterday (updated) 01/11/2009 19:15

 Bethlehem – Ma’an/Agencies –

 President Mahmoud Abbas leveled a rare direct criticism of the US on Sunday, a day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Israel for supposedly curbing settlement expansion.

“The United States did not offer anything new that would move the peace process forward between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Abbas said in an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television. Abbas is currently in Abu Dhabi where he met with Clinton before she flew to Israel.

“This US position is illogical. A six-month settlement freeze does not mean halting settlements completely, which is a condition for the resumption peace process,” Abbas added.

Despite this criticism, the president insisted that “there is no disagreement between the Palestinian Authority and US on resuming the peace process because Washington is negotiating with Tel Aviv, not with the PA.”

Abbas was referring to remarks Clinton made during a Jerusalem news conference on Saturday night alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she appeared to shift tone on the demand for a freeze on the construction of illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank. After months of diplomacy, Netanyahu has refused to comply with a freeze.

"What the prime minister [Netanyahu] has offered in specifics of restraint on the policy of settlements... is unprecedented in the context of prior-to negotiations," she said.

"There are always demands made in any negotiation that are not going to be fully realized," she explained. "Negotiation by its very definition is a process of trying to meet the other's needs while protecting your core interests, and on settlements there's never been a pre-condition."

Abbas’ spokesmen took a harder line on Clinton’s comments. "The negotiations are in a state of paralysis, and the result of Israel's intransigence and America's back-peddling is that there is no hope of negotiations on the horizon," Abbas' official spokesman Nabil Abu Rdainah said.

Erekat: Negotiations can be a smokescreen

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat also took issue with Clinton’s characterization of Israeli policy.

“What the Israelis are offering is not unprecedented. We have seen these same kinds of ‘arrangements’ before,” Erekat said in a statement released on Sunday.

“What would be unprecedented is a comprehensive settlement freeze by Israel in line with its obligations under international law and existing agreements, and a halt to Israeli policies in occupied East Jerusalem such as home demolitions, evictions and rapid settlement expansion, designed to rid the city of its Palestinian presence,” he added.

“What the Middle East peace process desperately needs right now is credibility, not more ‘process’. If there is one lesson that the last sixteen years of negotiations has taught us, it is that negotiations for their own sake do not create a horizon of hope, but instead provide a cover behind which Israel will further entrench its occupation, and continue to create ‘facts on the ground’ that foreclose any prospect for a two-state solution,” Erekat also said.

Netanyahu: Palestinians ought to come to their senses

Meanwhile, Netanyahu urged Palestinians to "come to their sense and enter peace talks," according to the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. "The peace process is in the interest of Israel and certainly of Palestine."

"We expressed willingness to do unprecedented things, but we are encountering the opposite trend on the other side – putting up preconditions that have not been posted since the beginning of the process 16 years ago," he reportedly added at the start of his government's weekly cabinet session.